The problem Ian Lavery presents is not his current positioning nor his record since entering parliament. Rather, it's because of what he did before taking his seat. I am, of course, talking about the miners' pension controversy. The charges are nothing new and have been in the public domain for quite some time. This refers to two payments made to Ian by the National Union of Mineworkers while he was working for them and winning millions for the miners' compensation fund. In 1994 he received a £75k below market rate loan from the NUM to help pay off his mortgage, which was written off when he left the union's employ. And in 2010 after resigning his position to become a MP Ian received £90k in redundancy costs. You don't have to be an expert in workplace law to understand that redundancy payments are made only when one's position becomes, um, redundant.
Matters aren't helped by the overly technical responses Ian has advanced when confronted by these payments. It was all within the rules, a cry oft-heard during at height of the MPs' expenses crisis, as readers will recall. There is no suggestion any laws were broken, but still, there are two important political issues here. The first should be obvious. Given the number just done on Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party, it is both foolish and naive to push a potential contender with an albatross like this flapping about his neck. Do you think the Tories aren't going to run amok with this, with lurid headline after lurid headline raking over Ian's finances, and how do you suppose it would go down in the sorts of constituencies Ian is supposedly uniquely placed to win back? I can't imagine many, especially among retired miners, finding much encouragement to vote for a Lavery-led Labour Party when they learn how their union funds were disposed.
And the second more serious problem is how a Ian Lavery candidacy would shine an unwelcome light on finances in the labour movement. You might remember how Arthur Scargill took the NUM to court because it refused to meet the costs of his flat in The Barbican. Again, entirely within the rules (or not, in this case) but utterly repugnant. And this is one of thousands of such stories. The far left group known for its workers' representatives on a workers' wage shtick turning a blind eye to its own senior union cadre pulling down huge salaries. The regional committee who covered local officials' drink driving fines. The golden goodbyes shelled out to officials a couple of years off retirement when one union merged with another. The spamming of union expense accounts by a Trotskyist darling. All the properties, grace and favour amenities, large salaries commanded by union big wigs, the not entirely gainful employment of facilities time, and money wasted on inter-union competition. A broom does need taking to our movement, but that should be wielded by us, not the Tories. Should Ian be a candidate, let alone the leader, the likelihood is there for financial malpractice to be used as a stick for attacking trade unions. And that, while we face four or five more years of screwing over workers, is the last thing we need.
Therefore, in the spirit of not handing our enemies ammunition to fire at us and standing against money grubbing in our movement, Ian Lavery should not stand.
15 comments:
Some rally dodgy stuff going on, lots of people doing well out of the party and workers being paid off. To outsiders it appears a lot like nepotism
«both foolish and naive to push a potential contender with an albatross like this flapping about his neck. Do you think the Tories aren't going to run amok with this, with lurid headline after lurid headline raking over»
This is perhaps the most naive, optimistic argument that I have read yet from our blogger: unfortunately the anti-Labour media will *never* stop making up or repeating lurid headlines about any Labour leader, unless that leader is a safe tory/liberal-but-in-name.
The media operate on a well known "cognitive bias": that people come to believe whatever "gossip" is repeated by several seemingly unrelated sources, regardless of evidence or even plausibility.
Plus most vote on their impression of how aligned a party is with their material interests, rather than their impression of the leader.
Compared to those of Boris Johnson the sins of Ian Lavery are venial and trivial, and very few politicians don't have equivalent issues. Among them apparently Corbyn, as years of huge efforts to find fault by the tory and likudnik media have only resulted in comically weak smears. But even comically weak smears can work if endlessly repeated by seemingly unrelated sources.
Even Tony Blair, before he showed his true colours, was "monstered" with the Conservative "demon eyes" campaign in 1997.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Labour,_New_Danger
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/1997/jan/10/past.andrewculf
«Some rally dodgy stuff going on, lots of people doing well out of the party»
Well, a large part of the areas where Labour has had a long standing majority have become the corrupt fiefs of the local "blue labour"/"corporatist union" cliques. This is not something new, it happened decades ago. Similar, but much worse, has happened in safe tory areas.
Two statistics have been published by "The Economist" over the years that show how rotten is the state of local politics *in general*:
* 40% of local councillors describe their job as "estate agent".
* 60% of local Conservative association chairmen are the owners of the local insurance/stock brokers.
Instead of Lavery, why not a female left-wing candidate, like Rebecca Long-Bailey or Angela Rayner? The next Labour leader *is* going to be attacked, viciously and continually, but many of these attacks would backfire by looking sexist - and many of them would *be* sexist. So lets turn their own weapons against them!
«The next Labour leader *is* going to be attacked, viciously and continually, but many of these attacks would backfire by looking sexist - and many of them would *be* sexist.»
It does not matter -- the sort of voter that Labour needs to win worries about getting to the end of the month, not about "sexism". Also, odds are that the fault-finders will label a female Labour leader as a misogynist and sexist herself.
Try to imagine being told 5 years ago that Corbyn would be Labour leader, probably the guy in Parliament with the fewest skeletons in his closet, and that he would be denounced in Parliament by Labour MPs as a lifelong "f*cking racist and antisemite", and described as the main leader of a widespread campaign of persecution of minorities. You would have laughed.
As to "antisemitism" here is an opinion piece that I think describes *Wes Streeting* as a willing sellout accomplice in Corbyn's imaginary campaign of persecution of minorities:
https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/12/corbyn-couldnt-have-done-it-without-moderates-like-jess-phillips/>
“If Wes Streeting is your idea of an ally, your enemies have caught one hell of a break. On Thursday, he and all the other ‘friends of the community’ tried to put their anti-Semitic party into government and were only stopped by ex-steelworkers in Redcar and Workington. There is always a place for atonement but the Streeting tendency aren’t here to atone. They consider themselves victims of Corbynism when they were its enablers.”
Lavery, Long-Bailey, Rayner and others like Burgon from that same Stalinoid influenced Corbyn stable would all be disastrous. It would mean not learning the lesson of the election resulting from the adoption of a pro-Brexit stane, and economic nationalism.
That can already be seen in Long-Bailey's announcement that she intends to appease bigotry, nationalism and xenophobia further by being a champion of "progressive patriotism" - an oxymoron if ever there was one.
The truth is there are no good choices because Corbyn failed to democratise the party and push through mandatory reselection - we know why, now, in order to try to secure his own position, and centrally imposed, UNITE backed, Stalinoid candidates on unwilling CLP's much in the fashion of Blair and Brown.
However, in terms of his commitemnt to making a clear break from Blairism, of pushing through necessary democratic reforms, of making a clearbreak from the disastrous pro-Brexit stance, and his opposition to Trident, not to mention the potential of being the first black Prime Minister, whose military service means he's hard to attack by the Tory media, Clive Lewis offers by far the best choice.
«here is an opinion piece that I think describes *Wes Streeting* as a willing sellout accomplice in Corbyn's imaginary campaign of persecution of minorities:»
In case someone missed it, the point I am trying to make here is not about the "antisemitism" issue, but that the propaganda media, of which the Spectator is obviously part, seem to have no limits to how far they will go in making up wild accusations for party-political effect.
So being too fussy about who is going to be Labour leader seems to me a lesser worry; every unthatcherite Labour leader will have their past thoroughly raked to find fault, and if like in Corbyn's case there is pretty much nothing to find, a large stream of smears will just be made up and repeated endlessly, because it is repetition that matters, not plausibility or truth.
The saving grace is that readers of the propaganda media are almost all already property owners terrified of any shift away from ultrathatcherism, so they already believe the worst about whichever Labour leader were not thatcherite. And that's another reason to worry less about whatever the press will write about any unthatcherite Labour leader.
The real problem is the BBC, because it is widely watched across the political spectrum (but not so much by young people), so it has the potential to influence swing voters. Because of that the Conservatives have been post-election quite explicit about "normalizing" it, so that it should only give a platform "mainstream" "likud approved" "english values" opinion.
"most vote on their impression of how aligned a party is with their material interests, rather than their impression of the leader"
This is an article of faith for the religion of Marxism, but i's never been my experience when canvassing. Every ex-Labour voter I encountered had turned away from Labour because they personally disliked Corbyn, and/or they wanted an immediate Brexit for entirely emotive reasons. The typical Brexit enthusiast if confronted with any amount of forecasts of economic hardship will tell you that it's a price worth paying and that we survived worse in 1940. Christianity may be a religion for slaves, but Marxism is a religion for machines, that's why Marxists can never understand the workings of democracy which are powered entire by emotion and imagination, never by rational calculation.
But as for Ian Lavery, I think we have to accept that anyone with enough political and life experience to be the next Prime Minister will have a history that can be used against them by the Tories and their lackeys in the media. Corbyn was vilified for doing good, like facilitating the peace process in Ireland and standing up for the Palestinians. So anyone who has no vulnerabilities to criticism would have to be so bland and inactive as to be wholly unsuited to leadership, especially in such a viciously divided body as the parliamentary Labour Party.
As regards the idea that the Tories would refrain from attacking a female leader for fear of looking sexist, tell that to Diane Abbott! And remember also that a large proportion of the Party members who've been accused of antisemitism are themselves Jewish.
Lavery is the best candidate by a mile, all the above withstanding.
The media and the party got it all wrong .....You cant just blame Corbyn it's the whole squad and ludicrous political shit
Lammy
Abbott
Rayner
Phillips
Butler
Thornberry
And supporters
Afra Hirsch
Ash sarka
And what's his name....Owen
And all the other commies
The notion that Lavery's past would be a millstone around the party's neck is, I think, missing the point. The last leader was a vegan, pacifist, anti-racist jam maker, and the media still turned him into Atilla the Hun. Any leader will get this treatment, with or without a past. While I am not a Lavery cheerleader, he at least seems willing to go toe to toe with detractors - and given where Corbyn's strategy led, right now that seems like a good idea.
"commies" indeed!!
This is the twenty-first century, and we are 20 years into the century.
Thank you for making me smile - not much to smile about in the current political position.
Btw, I must agree with Phil - Lavery would be torn apart by the MSM, not to mention social media. No.
"probably the guy in Parliament with the fewest skeletons in his closet"
LOLOL--- It's only Jan 2 but that is my comment of the year!!!
Does very recent history not show that a potential pm's behaviour, history of truthfulness or willingness to be called to account by a journalist is irrelevant if you offer something the public want? Namely Trump and Johnson!
Post a Comment